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black gruyère out of the surface with pickaxes, and load them into the trucks; the trucks are hauled to the
lakeside, emptied and sent back for more. The lake being inexhaustible, the operation will presumably
go on until the end of the world—a thought as appalling as anything in Aquinas or Dante. To punish the
villagers for destroying some humming-birds that were really their ancestral ghosts, an Indian village is
said to have been engulfed in this filth. Sir Walter Raleigh also caulked his vessels here on his way to the
Orinoco.
It was a relief to leave this beastly place and motor away to Fyzabad through the trees, and on into the
rolling country near Syparia. Here we contemplated the little Black Virgin of the parish. She is a grey-
faced figure entirely clad in leather, standing above the altar in a church founded in the eighteenth cen-
tury by Franciscans from Aragon. The image is thaumaturgic and possesses the faculty, not uncommon in
Italian and Byzantine saints, of homing when she is removed from her shrine, like those wonderful ikons
that embark on solitary Odysseys across the mountains of Athos: a feat of levitation twice as miraculous
as the airy journeys of St. Joseph of Cupertino. She did not hold us for long, however, and it seemed an-
omalous and wrong that, turning from such a figure from the Old World, we should be surrounded not by
Tuscans or Calabrians or Macedonians, but by Hindus in saris, and even, here and there, in turbans. The
entire district round Fyzabad was settled by indentured labourers who preferred to remain there when
their contracts had expired, and swop their return tickets for ten acres of land.
What happened was this. After the slaves were emancipated on August 1st, 1834, the short period
of compulsory apprenticeship to their old masters was abandoned everywhere by 1838. The Negroes in
most of the islands, including Trinidad, moved into the fruitful interior, where they squatted and lived
happy and indolent lives on their little plots under the bread-fruit trees. When the ground was exhausted,
they had only to move on and clear a fresh plot of ground. This flight from the plantations threatened
to bring the sugar industry to a standstill, and free labourers, indentured to work for a number of years,
were brought from many sources including St. Helena and Sierra Leone. The scheme was abandoned as
a failure. Then an experiment was made with labourers from India, which turned out to be so successful
that in 1845 a regular flow began of Indian labourers, mostly from Bengal. [3] The greatest demand was
in Trinidad, where they arrived at the rate of two or three thousand a year. They now form a third of the
population, and in British Guiana they are the largest single element in the colony. The movement went
on at this rate until the end of the First World War, when the Indian Government placed it under a ban.
There are some very unpleasant stories about the speculators in these movements of population, one of
which, mentioned by the German writer Otto Kunze in a nasty little book called Um die Erde , indicates
that, to increase the demand for labour in Trinidad, they thinned the ranks of local labour by spreading
small-pox among the Negro population. (If this incredible statement is anything more than a slander, it
also had the effect, according to Kingsley, of killing off large numbers of monkeys in the island, whose
susceptibility to small-pox and cholera is, unfortunately, one of their anthropoid characteristics.)
When their time was up, most of these immigrants remained and settled on the land which was granted
to them; some even went back to India, to return to the island with a host of relations and acquaintances.
The majority were Hindus; but there were a large number of Mussulmans too, whose presence is sig-
nalized by the mosque in Port of Spain, and the occasional Moslem cemeteries—those little groves of
turbaned monoliths—in the country districts. But wide tracts of Trinidad are now, for all visual purposes,
Bengal. The same vegetation is here, the same villages of mud and thatch, a semblance of the same cloth-
ing, and everywhere little Hindu cemeteries with scarcely identifiable idols and epitaphs on the head-
stones inscribed in Urdu characters.
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